4.01.2014

Nelmo Ramos, a coffee producer in Guatemala, shows how roya is blighting their coffee crop

Panic from Paris to Perth, from Rio to Reno, from Times Square to Timbucto the news is spreading, trouble's brewing and the yuppies are in panic mode. The bad news is that global warming is wiping out coffee crops throughout Central and South America, the world's #1 producers of aribica coffee beans. Oh and starving the peasant farmers too. Things are so desperate that even Starbucks has visited the White House to warn that, without a plan to address climate change, the world's coffee supply is under threat.

The culprit is the rising temperatures resulting from global warming that have caused catastrophe for those who depend on the region's most important cash crop: coffee. In the last two years, warmer temperatures and higher humidity levels have contributed to the spread of the roya - or coffee rust – a fungus that attacks leaves and fruits. Whole plantations have been destroyed and tens of thousands of campesinos have lost their jobs.

Roya, rust, blight by any name,.it's ugly. First, parts of the arabica bush's glossy green leaves turn a dirty orange. Then dark dead patches appear and become holes. The infection spreads to the ripening berries, turning them from bright red to a zombie-skin grey. However, the rust cannot survive temperatures below 10C. Until recently Roya usually occurred only below 1,300 metres. Up in the hills, cold nights and drier weather kept the disease at bay. And so that's where the coffee farms are.

This problem - habitat migration - isn't peculiar to coffee, the same thing is happening in our oceans where ocean chemistry is skewed by atmospheric carbon pollution driven global warming, some fish in the tropics are going extinct. Others, especially in northern latitudes, are migrating. In their place jellyfish are taking over in record numbers due to a global increase in ocean temperature and acidity (conditions in which jellyfish thrive) and the relentless overfishing of their predators.

Trees killed by the mountain pine beetle in B.C.'s Manning Park

Same creepy creeping habitat is behind the expansion of the mountain beetle's devastation of B.C.'s interior forests. Those tiny critters used to be contained by the -40C winter temps that just haven't occurred in long enough time frames in the last decade or two. Hell even this year's Iditarod, 'The Last Great Race On Earth', was run on slush, mud and rocks because there was no snow. Zip, zero, so bad the famed annual sled-dog race historically run through 1,000 miles of tundra so wild organizers have to pack down 10-foot snowdrifts to resupply racers, this year saw organizers dumping truckloads of snow at the start and finish, mushers enduring multiple crashes and injuries with many failing to finish, and so much open water on the trail at least one racer joked he should have hitched his dogs to a surfboard not sled.

It's called empirical evidence, and it's the non-ivory tower, non intellectual, direct and non-debatable reality that now threatens the cappuccino crowd. Up here in the Great White North both the gentrified Starbuckians and the plaid shirted Tim Horton's patrons had remained skeptical despite other direct evidence often choosing to focus on how global warming would cause a tourism boom in the Arctic, with melting ice-caps giving cruise ships increased access to the area or how many new oil and gas industry jobs there would be instead of acknowledging obvious evidence of human caused disaster like:

Arctic albedo decrease due to sea ice loss.
Arctic CO2 release due to thawing tundra.
Arctic methane release due to thawing land tundra.
Arctic methane release due to thawing subsea tundra and venting seabed methane.
Arctic albedo loss due to black carbon deposition.
Arctic albedo loss due to land vegetation changes.
Warming Arctic seas due to runoff from warming lands.
Arctic albedo decrease due to land snow and ice sheet melt.

But those days have passed now that there's a new terrorist in town - no coffee. You'd think this moving pictorial essay from the Guatemalan highlands and Nicaragua's Jinotega hills, where starving villagers desperately struggle to save their lives and their livelihoods, would normally be expected to cause a minor ripple among the consumer class, but now, under the threat of global warming's new terrorists i suspect even the caffeine culture's most ardent skeptics will rise up and fight for their Java Buzz.

La Via Campesina is the international movement which brings together millions of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants and agricultural workers from around the world. It defends small-scale sustainable agriculture as a way to promote social justice and dignity. It strongly opposes corporate driven agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature.

Sitting Up Mud

"Bokonon made mud. Bokonon said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" "See all I've made, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job Bokonon had done.

"Nice going, Bokonon. Nobody but you could have done it, I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor!"

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! "What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. Amen."

Quotes

"Our dreams draw us foward, as water whispers to the dowser's wand."- Tony Cohan

"Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide." - Tom Robbins

"Politics is how you live your life, not who you vote for!" -Jerry Rubin

"The pencil is mightier than the pen"- Robert Pirsig

"Resist much, obey little." -Walt Whitman

When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said, “At least the handle is one of us.” — Turkish proverb

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction" - Pascal

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

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Theism?

Flying Spagetti Monster Church

The single greatest service each of us can provide to our planet, our families and ourselves is to grow our own organic food from heritage seeds. Then to save our own seed in turn, and in so doing be part of the future solution to the present day destruction being sown by GMO's, agri-business and the bio-technology giants. - Bob Wiley